The largest onchain perpetual futures venues now quote as deep as the biggest centralized exchanges and cost less to trade at standard fee tiers, according to a Castle Labs study of live order books across 10 trading venues.

Execution quality is the argument centralized exchanges (CEXs) have used to hold institutional order flow. Castle Labs' readings remove it for the largest crypto markets. The research firm found a pricing problem in real-world asset (RWA) markets, where venue indexes drift apart by as much as 30 basis points (bps) once the underlying market shuts, and where some venues keep charging funding through the weekend while others charge nothing.

On a $100,000 bitcoin order, the median centralized book cost 0.07 bps in slippage against 0.21 bps on Hyperliquid and 0.41 bps on Lighter. Adding the taker fee reverses the ranking: 5.07 bps on the centralized median, 4.71 bps on Hyperliquid and 0.41 bps on Lighter, which charges standard accounts no maker or taker fee. A 5 bps taker fee on a $100,000 bitcoin order is $50. Slippage on the same order is under a dollar.

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Where The Fee Bites

Hyperliquid came in 7% to 24% cheaper than the centralized median on bitcoin, Zcash and $HYPE, and 1% to 8% cheaper on ether and Solana. Lighter was over 60% cheaper across the basket.

The centralized advantage on raw slippage held only for the two largest assets, and it narrowed with size. Hyperliquid's bitcoin slippage was 11 times the centralized figure at $1,000, 3.2 times at $100,000 and 1.4 times at $1 million. At $1 million, Hyperliquid posted the lowest slippage of the five venues measured, at 3.7 bps against 3.8 bps on Binance, 4.5 bps on OKX and 4.6 bps on Bybit.

Resting size within 10 bps of the mid told the same story. Hyperliquid held $54.5 million on bitcoin against a $47.4 million centralized median, $4.7 million on Solana against $3 million, and more than the centralized median on Zcash and $HYPE. It held 94% of the centralized depth on ether during U.S. hours. Lighter carried roughly a third of the centralized bitcoin depth.

Bitcoin funding ran between 1.9% and 7.6% annualized across every venue in the set, centralized and onchain.

Seven Of The Top Ten

Castle Labs frames the execution numbers against a shift in what perp traders are buying. RWA markets made up more than 27% of all perp volume in July 2026, and seven of the 10 most-traded perp assets as of Sept. 10 were RWAs, led by the Nasdaq 100 index and gold, which together carried more than $1.4 billion in 24-hour volume and $850 million in open interest. RWA perp volume reached $123 billion in August, or 15% of onchain volume, with TradeXYZ and Variational accounting for 90% of it.

The Defiant reported in August that RWA markets topped half of Hyperliquid's weekly volume for two straight weeks in July, the first time perps on stocks, commodities and indexes out-traded crypto there.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) now hold over 13% of global perp volume, up from 4% in 2024, with a peak of 14% in December 2025. Centralized venues traded $4.56 trillion in perps over a 30-day window against $615 billion onchain. Castle Labs puts the category's record open interest at $15.2 billion. Perp DEX open interest stands at $14.1 billion today, with Hyperliquid at 58%, Aster at 10%, Variational at 7.4% and Lighter at 5.9%, DefiLlama data shows.

The Weekend Index Drift

For stocks, indexes and commodities, Castle Labs found TradeXYZ tighter and deeper than the centralized median on four of five assets, with gold the exception. Taken venue by venue, Binance quoted tighter than TradeXYZ on Nvidia, gold and West Texas Intermediate crude, while TradeXYZ was tighter on SanDisk and silver.

Among onchain RWA venues at $100,000, TradeXYZ posted the tightest spread at 0.35 bps and the lowest slippage at 0.84 bps. Lighter was cheapest all-in at 1.04 bps because it charges no fee. Variational's perp markets came to 2.82 bps, Ondo to 4.91 bps and QFEX to 8.83 bps.

The divergence appears when the reference market closes. Castle Labs compared the indexes of TradeXYZ, QFEX and Lighter across weekday, overnight and Saturday readings. Crypto indexes agreed. RWA indexes spread apart, reaching 30 bps on weekends.

Funding follows the design choice. Binance, Bybit, OKX and QFEX charged nothing on gold and silver while the reference was shut; QFEX zeroes funding outside a symbol's market hours. TradeXYZ, Lighter and Ondo kept charging. Over two weekends, Lighter's rate came to 95% annualized for longs on crude and about negative 20% for shorts on both equity indexes.

Castle Labs traced WTI funding averages of negative 21% to negative 65% annualized across all venues, including centralized ones, to four days in September. TradeXYZ's oil oracle rolls from the front-month Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) contract to the next between the fifth and 10th business day of each month. That window ran Sept. 8 to Sept. 15 and overlapped a supply shock that moved crude about $6 a barrel on Sept. 10.

Where Pre-IPO Prices Split

Private-company perps showed the widest dispersion in the study. Venue prices for Anthropic differed by 3.8% and OpenAI by 5.7%. The same measure on Nvidia was 0.1 bps. Zhipu, Minimax and Unitree, listed as pre-IPO perps months ago, now trade within 1 bps to 5.8 bps of each other after going public.

Holding costs diverge with the index. A one-year long on Anthropic cost 18.3% on Entropy, 1.1% on Lighter and negative 0.8% on QFEX. A long on SHEIN cost 47% on TradeXYZ and 7.2% on Lighter.

Liquidity is thin. No venue held more than $160,000 within 10 bps on any pre-IPO market, and none could fill $1 million. A $100,000 Anthropic order cost 2 to 13 bps in slippage on QFEX, 30 bps on Entropy and 67 to 218 bps on Lighter. Entropy traded the most pre-IPO volume, at $4.2 million a day on Anthropic.

Measured In 45-Second Slices

The readings come from public venue application programming interfaces (APIs) covering order books, index and mark prices, open interest, fee schedules and margin requirements. Castle Labs priced a fixed basket on Binance, Bybit, OKX, Hyperliquid, Lighter, TradeXYZ, Entropy, Ondo, Variational and QFEX at the same instant, repeating every 45 to 60 seconds for 10 to 20 minutes, on Sept. 14, 15, 16, 19, 23 and 24.

Every venue is priced at its standard entry fee tier. TradeXYZ and Entropy run most markets in a growth mode that cuts the taker fee to 0.9 bps; gold on TradeXYZ is excluded and pays 9 bps, which Castle Labs applied. QFEX charges 10 bps on single stocks at entry tier and 1.5 bps at its top tier. Institutional traders pay less than entry-tier rates on most venues.

Lighter told Castle Labs that venues misjudge what a listing requires. "The mistake is sometimes treating a listing as a launch. It is not. You need the market maker, hedge path, distribution, and user demand ready on day one," the team said. "We have listed markets too early before, and they didn't work because one or more of those pieces were missing."